John Wayne (2 page)

I am staring up at him in the cool delicious darkness of a theater, my father etched sixty feet high on a white-silver screen. My girlfriend nudges me. I pass our candy without shifting my gaze from the screen. It is 1963, I am seven years old, and today is a rare occasion. Almost always I see my father's movies at home, in our projection room, with my mom and dad and our new baby, Ethan, and sometimes my father's movie star friends.

Unless I am with my parents, or at school, I do not leave the house much at all. We live in Encino, in the San Fernando Valley, and our white colonial house sits at the top of a steep mountain rise, high above five rolling acres, all enclosed by ten-foot walls. At the bottom of our twisting driveway is a camera, fixed on our tall electric gate. Though
sometimes we call it “the compound,” our estate is lovely as well as confining, precisely what my parents desire. They are frightened I might get kidnapped, especially my mother, who comes from Peru, but knows about the evil that can descend on Hollywood's children.

Today I am free. It is Saturday, late afternoon, and I am sitting in a theater with my girlfriend and her mother, surrounded by anonymous people. Up on the screen my father makes a joke, not even a joke, just a stoic remark, but it's in his familiar drawl and the smiling strangers around me murmur their approval. I feel a trace of pride and a pinch of resentment, that all these faceless people think my father is such a charming man.

The movie is over and I'm glad. It's another Western, and I'm a little sick of them. My eyes still set for blackness, on the street I am blinded by sunlight, and the sticky summer air curls my golden brown hair. On the ride home my girlfriend and her mother discuss my dad and the movie. They are animated, and I know by their glances they want me to join in, but I just don't. Like my father I am prone to silent moods. Politely saying good-bye, I watch their shrinking car leaving our driveway, wondering if I should have asked them in, to see my father, and if they are mad, and whether the whole ride home they'll talk behind my back. I am not all that paranoid—I don't think—but sometimes I can't tell who likes me only for me.

He isn't home anyway. My dad is again working late this weekend, over the mountain pass in the peculiar place called Hollywood. Usually, when my father is in town, he's always home for dinner. The second he bursts in our front door, he always says, “HELLO THE HOUSE!” He
booms
it, and the air in our house crackles with his energy. Then I run down the stairs and jump off the last one, into my father's outstretched arms. I am not as little as I once was, but it hasn't stopped our ritual. We've been doing it for years, and no one else is invited.

Tonight my father misses dinner, and there is no “hello the house.” Tonight he's in my room before I can climb off
my bed to greet him. Inside my bedroom, my father is a giant in a dollhouse. When he sits on my bed now, it sags and groans under his weight. I need to know why he's so late, want to tell him how striking he looked on the full-size screen, but I don't get the chance—my father wraps me in his arms and pulls me to his chest. I can smell his Camel cigarettes, his Neutrogena soap and Listerine. I start feeling edgy. My father always talks before he hugs.

When my dad releases me, he cups my chin in his hand. I am lost for a moment inside his ice-blue eyes. My father has the bluest, lightest eyes I have ever seen.

“Aissa?”

There is a tightness to his voice. Now I know something is wrong. All I say is, “Yes, Daddy?”

“Aissa, when you get older, and realize I'm not as strong as you think I am, will you still love me?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Always with my father, it is “Yes, Daddy”; by now I say it out of reflex. Really, though, I am puzzled. My father is the strongest man on earth. At seven years old I do not know everything, but this I know utterly and positively. I want to ask why he'd say something so silly, but now he is looking outside my window and just that quickly I lose my nerve. Maybe my dad is only tired. Maybe his violent smoker's cough will not let him think straight.

As he always does when he is in town, my father curls the bottom of my blanket under my feet and leans back in to kiss me goodnight. He holds me close again, then I shut my eyes and pretend to be sleepy. I peek at his broad back as he leaves, then lie unsettled in darkness for what seems like hours. The following morning, and for many days after, his strange words echo again and again through my mind.

Sipping bitter coffee in a chilled hotel room, I stare outside at a listless Western morning. It is June 11,1979, and the doctors say today will be the day. Today my father will die of cancer.

I do not weep. Instead I feel frozen, pinned here in my
chair by grief and memory. It's ironic, I suppose, that my relationship with my movie star father has somehow played out in three stages. Or, as it is said in Hollywood, three acts.

When I was a little girl, I looked at him through idolatrous eyes. I saw only the good and pretended about the rest. Around the time I turned six, my fear of my father set in, and I was intimidated by him for more than ten years. What we had between us began transforming again when I was nearing eighteen. As I started asserting some independence, as my father was losing his health and also losing my mother—and began turning more and more to me—most of my fear of him dissolved. For so many years, my real words had gone away whenever my father and I had gotten alone. And then, I could finally talk to my father.

Now I am twenty-three, and he and I have never been closer. I hate that it took so long, but I believe I am finally seeing him clearly. My father is vast, endearing, courageous, caring, tenacious, and vital. Still, he is not the faultless hero who strode through my early childhood. He has deep fears of his own. He has demons, self-doubt, and towering rage. John Wayne is not invincible, and soon he will not be around to protect me.

Over the years, learning the truth about him has been stunning. At times, it has thrown my entire childhood into question: Was it ever really what I once believed it to be? Was he?

Still, learning the truth has also made me love my father harder, the father who exists, not the image we once both created, then clung to so fiercely together for so many years. Even more than I once loved that dream, I love my real father with all his imperfections. I want him to know this. More than anything in the world I want him to know. But today my father will leave me, and now our time has run out.

I am not writing this book as a love letter to my father. Neither am I intent on destroying his public image, as some
Hollywood children have done to their parents. When my father was still alive I was constantly asked by the press, “What is it like to be John Wayne's daughter? How does it feel?” I never knew how to succinctly respond to such a complex subject, so mostly I issued stock answers. In the past several years, my own three children have started to ask me: “What was our grandfather like? What was John Wayne like?” For my kids, but also for my own cathartic reasons, I wanted to put down on paper the life I shared with my father.

When I was eight weeks old, my father turned forty-nine. He was nearly sixty when I was ten. I viewed him through my own childhood lens: the notion that he'd been scarred and shaped by events I knew nothing about rarely crossed my mind. He was a grown-up. He sat at the head of our table. I figured his story pretty much started there.

I've done some looking into his past in order to come to grips with myself and with my dad, and to understand where John Wayne was in his life when he fathered me.

The year was 1953. Truce had been reached in Korea, and if that peace was uneasy, the country nevertheless was not at war. Bumper stickers announced
I LIKE IKE
, and trust ran high for the reassuring first-year president. Still a youthful medium, television had superceded radio and already had motion pictures reeling. One of TV's new, top-rated programs,
Ozzie and Harriet
, and many other shows like it, painted a placid picture: American home lives free of complication.

It was illusion. In Hollywood, where illusion was manufactured, no one knew this better than John Wayne. That fall, my father was wrapped in domestic scandal.

In November 1954, he would marry my mother, Pilar,
and his third and final marriage would endure for the next two decades. In 1956 my parents would have me.

But now, in late October 1953, his second marriage was ending, wildly, and reporters tripped over each other to detail the sordid news. The gossip mavens gushed, and even the restrained
Los Angeles Times
called it “The steamy divorce trial of the towering screen actor John Wayne.” All the while the public was enrapt. In 1950s Hollywood, the public images of private hell-raisers—and back then that included my dad—were honed, shined, and sanitized to keep negative press at a minimum. Still, there is no hiding hostile divorce, not when it's John Wayne's, and the trial for my dad was an embarrassing mark on a soaring career.

My father was then forty-six, already had twenty-five years in the business. After a long, arduous climb to the top of his profession, he was finally box office gold. In 1951, producer Howard Hughes had paid him $301,000 to star in
Flying Leathernecks
, and this was called the highest one-film salary ever given to an actor. Between 1948 and 1953 my hard-working father starred in fifteen films, most notably
Fort Apache, Red River, Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande
, and
The Quiet Man
. His role in
Sands of Iwo Jima
, as Marine Sergeant John M. Stryker, won him more than an Oscar nomination; it had stunning impact on people who saw it. When my father charged up Iwo Jima Hill, only to be cut down by sniper fire just steps from the top, people wept in their seats. Their tears did not go unnoted by the czars ruling Hollywood. With the film industry ailing, its income and stature diminished by the rise of TV, the power brokers came to view my dad as a rare and critical asset. “There's nothing wrong with Hollywood,” a producer told
Cosmopolitan
, “that a dozen John Waynes couldn't cure.”

Privately, what needed fixing was his second marriage. Back in 1944, his first marriage, to Josephine Saenz, the mother of his first four children, had ended in divorce. My father remarried in 1946. He met his next wife in Mexico, a country he loved second only to this one. On the night Ray
Milland introduced my father to Esperanza Bauer, who called herself Chata, she claimed to be a part-time actress. In truth, Chata was a dark, voluptuous, high-priced call girl. By the time my father discovered the facts of her life, he'd fallen in love.

Not surprisingly, my father never spoke to me about Chata. I never heard about her until after he died, and at first I was shocked and disbelieving. But then I learned more. Evidently, Chata told my father she desperately sought a new life, to escape her past and marry a man she loved. I also learned that my father's first marriage, to Josephine, had had little physical contact its last several years, and that Chata Bauer was blatantly sexual. At that stage of his life, perhaps Chata was who my father needed. Besides, he said he loved her, and when John Wayne fell in love he tended to marry. Those who knew him well always called my father “the marrying kind.”

Nevertheless, when he brought Chata back to the States and later wed her in Long Beach, his close friends said he was making a dire mistake. John Ford, the director my father most often worked with, came down harder, shunning my dad for nearly two years. By then the lives and careers of Ford and my father were tightly linked, and my dad once told me that Ford was the only man he had ever feared. An expert manipulator of actors, Ford's machinations often continued offscreen. But he never swayed my father as much as their mutual fans believe, for my father was simply too willful. And Ford's hostility notwithstanding, my father and Chata set out to make their unlikely marriage work.

They could and then they couldn't. For the seven stormy years they stayed married they separated numerous times. When the marriage finally shattered, the allegations made for a lurid trial. Too much angry suspicion, too much hard liquor, and not enough fidelity—these were the mutual charges.

According to my father's testimony, Chata's mother had quickly moved in with the newlyweds, and he would often come home to find drunken wife and in-law, entwined in
each other's arms, lying out cold on a bed. Chata, he also testified, once threatened to kill him.

During the making of
Angel and the Badman
, Chata had convinced herself that my father was sleeping with Gail Russell. My father's handpicked costar, Miss Russell was then twenty-three, emotionally fragile, and dazzlingly beautiful. My father told the court that on the evening of the movie's wrap party, when he arrived home at one-thirty
A.M
., “My wife refused to let me in. I could hear her and her mother talking about me loudly. I rang the bell but they wouldn't open the door. Then I broke a glass panel, reached in, and opened it myself. Chata and her mother, they came charging out. Chata had a forty-five in her hand. She and her mother were fighting over it.”